How to Care About Animals cover art

How to Care About Animals

An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers)

Preview

Try Premium Plus free
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

How to Care About Animals

By: Porphyry, M. D. Usher - translator with commentary
Narrated by: Peter Noble
Try Premium Plus free

$16.45 per month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $15.99

Buy Now for $15.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using voucher balance (if applicable) then card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions Of Use and Privacy Notice and authorise Audible to charge your designated credit card or another available credit card on file.
Cancel

About this listen

An entertaining and enlightening anthology of classical Greek and Roman writings on animals—and our vital relationships with them

How to Care about Animals is a fascinating menagerie of passages from classical literature about animals and the lives we share with them. Drawing on ancient writers from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and farmer M. D. Usher has gathered a healthy litter of selections that reveal some of the ways Greeks and Romans thought about everything from lions, bears, and wolves to birds, octopuses, and snails—and that might inspire us to rethink our own relationships with our fellow creatures. Presented in lively new translations, these pieces are filled with surprises—anticipating but also offering new perspectives on many of our current feelings and ideas about animals.

Here, Porphyry makes a compelling argument for vegetarianism and asserts that the just treatment of animals makes us better people; Pliny the Elder praises the virtuosity of songbirds and the virtuousness of elephants; Plutarch has one of Circe's pigs from the Odyssey make a serio-comic case for the dignity of the beasts of the field; Aristotle puts the study of animals on par with anthropology; we hear timeless Aesopian fables, including "The Hen That Laid the Golden Egg" and "The Fox and the Grapes"; and there is much, much more.

©2023 Princeton University Press (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Ethics & Morality Greek & Roman History

What listeners say about How to Care About Animals

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.